Kate Flora: It happened twenty-four years ago today, but Amy hasn’t been forgotten. Not by the family and friends who loved her and not by the police officers who investigated her disappearance.

I got involved because then Portland, Maine police Lieutenant Joseph K. Loughlin, who was my advisor on all things Portland and police for my Joe Burgess series, was in charge of the Portland piece of the investigation. Right from the beginning, he told me it was a case like no other that he’d seen. That knowledge of the wonderful person that Amy had been removed the traditional agency territorialism that usually came with cases involving local police agencies and Maine state police and allowed the lead detectives to work as a team.

I got involved because right from the get go, Joe said that it was a case he wanted to write about. I began as his writing coach, suggesting that whenever there was a critical moment or discovery in the case, he should take notes and put them in a file. Then the immediacy and emotions of the moment would be preserved until he was ready to write. But time passed. He kept talking about writing and the book didn’t get written. Eventually, my sidelines advising became a collaboration that resulted in the story of Amy’s murder, Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine.

For Joe, it was a work to honor the person Amy had been; a thank you to the dedicated officers who brought her killer to justice; and a warning to young women not to be too trusting. Along the way, learning who Amy had been made me realize the book was important. I felt like my previous ten+ years of writing crime fiction had been my rehearsal and taught me the skills I needed to tell Amy’s story.

The book begins like this:

It is every parent’s nightmare–your child goes out one Saturday night and vanishes off the face of the earth. It is also, sadly, something that happens far too often–a sensible and independent young woman who thinks she knows how to take care of herself crosses paths with a predator. The bad guy doesn’t look evil. He charming, charismatic, lively, and fun. It is only when he has his victim alone that his true self–his violent, explosive, self-indulgent and remorseless side–emerges. Suddenly, a lifetime of striving toward maturity and self-awareness, of good decisions and generous acts, is changed by one bad choice. This is one of those stories.

On Saturday night, October 20, 2001, a lovely blonde woman with a generous heart and a happy disposition set out to show a new acquaintance from Florida the nightlife in the Old Port area of Portland, Maine. After an evening shooting pool and dancing, twenty-five-year-0ld Amy St. Laurent disappeared.

The book is the story of how she was eventually found, a twisting tale of liars, missing guns, a devoted mother who would not give up hope that her daughter could be found, and public safety personnel from local and state agencies and the Maine warden service, who did not quit until they had found the young woman they had begun to refer to “our Amy.”